Medi­care soon may pay for de­vices that gen­er­ate e-mails and text mes­sages for pa­tients with speech im­pair­ments.

The pro­posed pol­icy change comes af­ter the CMS came un­der fire last year from the Lou Gehrig’s dis­ease com­mu­nity for not cov­er­ing de­vices adapted for non­speech uses such as e-mail and In­ter­net ac­cess. Since 2001, Medi­care has cov­ered speech-gen­er­a­tion de­vices for such pa­tients. Those de­vices pro­vide au­di­ble com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peo­ple in close prox­im­ity to the pa­tient. The pro­posal would ex­pand Medi­care cov­er­age to in­clude tech­nol­ogy that pro­duces writ­ten mes­sages for re­mote com­mu­ni­ca­tion.